In this paper, the effect of cochanneled Bluetooth (BT) piconets on a carrier-sense multiple-access (CSMA)-based wireless local area network (WLAN) is investigated. Specifically, the p-persistent CSMA protocol is considered for WLANs, and the probability of error of a WLAN packet is calculated in the presence of interfering BT packets of different lengths and variable piconet traffic loads and as a function of the BT's frequencyhopping guard time. The probability derivation is then used in

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... nction with the p-persistent CSMA throughput and delay formulations to examine its net performance in the presence of BT interference. Simulations have been used to corroborate the analytical results, which indicate that the presence of just one fully loaded interfering BT piconet reduces the peak CSMA throughput by 42%. Furthermore, we show that under fully loaded BT traffic conditions, the effect of more shorter BT packet transmissions on the CSMA delay performance can outweigh the interference impact of a higher number of BT piconets with longer packet transmissions. Index Terms-Bluetooth (BT), carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA), interference, packet radio networks (PRNs), performance evaluation. Imran Ashraf (M'09) received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering (major in telecommunications) from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, in 2002 and the M.Sc. degree in mobile and personal communications and the Ph.D. degree in telecommunications from King's College,